Ithaca Underground makes three-night stand at CSMA

Beginning Thursday night, Ithaca Underground will host its third annual November Music Series at the Community School of Music and Arts. Offering all-ages shows in collaboration with the Ithaca Fantastik film festival (marking its fifth year), the series spotlights a variety of bands from around the country.

Thursday’s show will feature indie-folk bands Powerdove (Cornell’s Annie Lewandowski with Thomas Bonvalet and Chad Popple), Red Sled Choir (the project of Matt Gordon) and Obody (the quartet marking the release of its new album; see below).

Friday’s show will crank up the volume, with Cleveland garage rocker Obnox (making his third visit to Ithaca this year) topping a bill that includes grindcore band Escuela, “noisician” MONKI, Brooklyn noise artist Dreamcrusher and Binghamton avant-rockers 100% Black (releasing a new 45 on Angry Mom Records; see below).

Saturday will feature the national touring package of Jeff Rosenstock, Katie Ellen and Hard Girls teaming with local ska band Viva Mayhem.

Obody(Photo: Provided)

Obody’s new album

Obody is led by singer-songwriter Peter Vincent, a Rochester native and former Ithacan who now lives in Philadelphia. While the band’s membership has changed over the years, the current lineup includes drummer Sarah Hennies, bassist Chris Ploss and violinist Jason Calhoun, with cellist TJ Borden occasionally joining in. The band’s new album “Is A Bridge / A Ready Place” is released on vinyl and cassette by Already Dead Records.

The band recorded the album in early 2015 in a room at Howl Studios in Trumansburg, with Ploss engineering the sessions. “We bought a little space heater because it was dropping to negative temperatures practically all month,” Vincent said via email. “We braved through some really intense Razor-scootering in the hallway outside our room, as well as some really even more intense Red Hot Chili Peppers covers from a band in a room below us. The violin parts on ‘Fly Away’ almost didn’t happen because of those RHCP covers.”

The band’s arrangements are both subtle and complex, with a mastery of dynamics often lacking in many bands.

“These players are all masters of knowing how to aid with both sound and silence,” Vincent said. “In addition to being expert listeners, they all know how to augment and color the vision without distorting it in a way that makes it less compelling. I can’t say enough about them as people much less as musicians.”

“Overall, the songs don’t tend to change much fundamentally from when they are my voice and an acoustic guitar,” he added. “But again — that’s where these players are so special. They can create these deeply powerful individual and sympathetic voices without altering the clarity of the vision.”

At Friday’s show, Binghamton-based 100% Black will celebrate the release of a new vinyl 45 on Angry Mom Records. The record includes two songs recorded at Oneonta’s Dry Hill Studio in collaboration with two members — Jeff Valla and Owen Marshall — of the now-defunct Ithaca band Sunspells.

“These were done in the studio without any songwriting, but we did a lot of tape splicing and editing after the fact,” said 100% Black guitarist Adam Southard. “We basically just recorded two long chunks, found some parts that made sense, and then made some edits. It’s done all analogue — even the mastering was done directly to vinyl.”

The band acknowledges that these songs are studio creations. “These songs we can’t really play in the real world, there too many leaps and bounds,” Southard said. “The song ‘No Adventure’ has a 13-second part that took seven hours to edit because of the vocal tape splicing. We’re a big fan of songs that can only live in the studio, and those two songs are definitely examples of that.”

The band cites influences such as the Velvet Underground, Neu and Can.

“When people ask us what kind of band we are, it’s a tricky question,” Southard said. “But we hold mood to be the most important thing. We admire a lot of bands that are instrumental and abstract improvisational, but what we really enjoy is making order out of improvisational moments. So all of our songs have been adapted from jams — we record everything thing we play, including our practices, and then make order from that.

“So I would describe us as an improvisational band that loves songs, and wants our music to come off as songs. Especially with the seven-inch vinyl — we wanted to embrace the format, which is two to three minutes long for a real song — they’re sort of warped version of a track as opposed to a ‘piece.’ ”